In Lahij, the heat chases you from the main street into the teahouse. The refrigerator has a brand of beer with the promising name Aysberq, and at every table, a set of dominoes, with an abacus for each of the two players, to keep track of the winnings.

At the table next to us, old regulars are playing in their Sunday suits, ironed trousers, white shirts. They lay each play down forcefully on the table with a loud slap, like my grandfather did in my childhood. I smile at this memory, the old man sends an apologetic look at me, like a child caught in the act. Do, they shout, two, chahor, four, pendj, five. I’m listening in surprise. Bo otobus-e si soʿati yad, he comes on the three o’clock bus, they say about someone. And although in the first centuries after Christ, Persian soldiers settled here in the Caucasus, on the northern border of their empire, they could not yet have brought an autobus with them, so they had to borrow it from a modern language, but the rest of the words form a carefully preserved Persian heritage, still more or less intelligible for a Persian ear. I’m at home.

Today the village, eight hundred strong, uses only the lower mosque, for in the upper one they have installed a museum. Nevertheless, before entering you still have to take off your shoes. The young attendant is glad to practice his English with a foreigner, but I ask him to guide us in the local Tat language. He looks at me in disbelief, he starts to say slowly, almost syllable by syllable: Lahij is composed of seven village parts… Turkic words are mixed with some archaic, lapidary Persian, as if he wanted to shout across the divide of two thousand years, as if the lost garrison wanted to report to the inspection committee arriving after two thousand years from the capital. Time unfolds before me like a dazzling mountain panorama. Bâle, motevadjam, yes, I understand, I say. The cashier lady puts down the knitting needles, her eyes open wide. “How do you know Lahiji?” she asks. “I speak Persian”, I say. By the time the visit ends, and we exit the museum, a small group is waiting for us in front of the former mosque, I have to say a few words to everyone, Tat and Persian words cling together into a bridge over the abyss of time.

Lahij, just like Xinaliq, was until recently not easy to get to. The settlement looked toward the mountain pass, from where the enemy was expected. Behind its back, in the direction of the former Persia, a mountain wall towers, broken only by the deep gorge of the Ghidirman river. The road, carved a few years ago into the rocks along the river, is a dirt road, still difficult to cover by car, and you can safely travel on it only between the spring thaw and the winter rains. This is the period when the craftsmen of Lahij, the descendants of the former armourers, must collect their income for the whole year from the thin trickle of tourists.

Once there were two hundred blacksmith’s shops in Lahic, but after the collapse of the Soviet Union there were only eight left. For the time being there is no demand for more, although the locals cherish high hopes about the new road crossing thirty kilometers of mountainous land. It is Sunday, two tourist buses arrive from the city of Ganja, lying two hundred kilometers away. Second and third year college students of English, they are here for the first time. They roam the streets of the village in groups of five or six, sooner or later each of them stalks us, gently, like kittens, and they let themselves be photographed with the foreigners. They all speak for the first time in English with a foreigner. They are just as excited, like the Tat boys were before. They experience in the same way, that through the language they speak, they enter into a community with a great, albeit remote, culture, whose existence is from now on a certain thing, fot it has sent to them its living messengers.

June 24, Midsummer’s Day, that is, the feast of the birth of St. John the Baptist. The feast falls in the period of the summer solstice, and in the Western church it precedes by exactly a year the birth of John’s younger cousin, Jesus, placed on the day of the winter solstice. This coincidence, and the increase and decline of the length of daylight which begins on these dates, nicely illustrates the saying of St. John the Baptist: He must increase, and I must decrease (Jn 3:30). The metaphor has been abundantly exploited by preachers for two thousand years.

During our Eastern journeys in recent months, we encountered several representations of St. John the Baptist with an iconography which is fairly unusual for the Western viewer. This feast is a good opportunity to present them.

That St. John carries his own head in his hand, while he looks at us with his other head on his neck, as in this Georgian icon, inevitably reminds us of the medieval catalog of monastic relics, quoted by István Ráth-Végh and later by Umberto Eco, which included, inter alia, the childhood skull of St. John the Baptist. Of course, no Orthodox believer thinks that St. John had two heads. The icon is not a worldly portrait of the saints, but the representation of their transcendent and eternal being. For the believer it is quite possible, that the saint, appearing in his otherworldly shape, points at his own relic revered in this world, as in fact happened, in the legend on the finding of the head of St. John the Baptist. The head lying in the bowl is a reference to an existing relic, which was preserved until 1204 in the palace chapel of Constantinople, and since the looting of Byzantium it is kept in the Amiens Cathedral. On the other hand, the severed head is also an attribute of the saint, a symbol referring to his martyrdom. In some 16th-century Greek icons John turns to Christ appearing in heaven, and by pointing to his skull relic on the earth, he holds this inscription in the hand:

“Seest Thou what suffer those who censure, O Word of God, the faults of the unclean. Not being able to bear censure, Lo Herod cut off my head, O Saviour.”

The scroll in the above icon, the other attribute of the saint, does not include this text, but the one he himself preached according to Matthew’s gospel. To understand it, let us see, instead of the Georgian icon, its Church Slavonic version in the recently visited monastery of Suceavița in Bucovina.

“Behold, I send my messenger/angel before thy face, which shall prepare thy way before thee. The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye way of the Lord, make his paths straight.”

The Greek word ἄγγελος means primarily “messenger”, and only in a second, Biblical sense the messengers of God, that is, the angels. However, the Greek icon tradition, to emphasize the divine mission of John, as well as what Jesus said about him: “among those born of women, there has not risen anyone greater than John the Baptist” (Mt 11:11), is based the second meaning in shaping his figure.

In some other icons we see the angel-John with a different attribute and inscription:

Instead of the head relic, John holds a cup in his hand, in which the naked child Jesus is floating, and he points on him. This symbol refers to the Mass, where the priest, when elevating the bread and wine converted into the body and blood of Christ, repeats these same words of John. As he takes over the text of John, so John here takes over from the priest the chalice with the host, testifying that Christ is truly present in them.

The same chalice with the Christ child floating in it can be seen in the outside wall of a number of Orthodox churches, to bear witness to the reality of the consecration that takes place inside, in the sanctuary. As we have seen, painted in the famous “Voroneț blue”, on the church of the Voroneț Monastery, founded in 1488 by the Moldovan prince Stephen the Great.